Patient satisfaction in developing countries

Efforts to obtain useful information on patient satisfaction in Indonesia have been frustrated by a tendency of respondents to withhold critical comment. A survey of 75 patients in eleven health centers on three islands attempted to obtain credible information on satisfaction by asking for information on events, not opinions, and on the relative importance of the factors surveyed. Unlike previous research where 95% of respondents typically answered they were ‘fully satisfiedʹ, 28% of the respondents replied that their consultation had not been conducted in private (ranked first in importance among the nonmedical factors), 65% said the facility could be cleaner (ranked second in importance) and 19–48% reported not receiving various kinds of information (ranked third). Lending credence to these results, the respondents were able to support their positive answers with corroborative information in a high percentage of instances.